[2][3] On 2 January 2023, Additional Registrar General of India communicated to all the states that the date of freezing of administrative boundaries had been extended till 30 June 2023.
[6] In September 2019, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had stated that the 2021 national census would be done fully digitally through a mobile phone application,[7] and will be carried out in 16 languages.
Following the postponement of the deadline of freezing administrative boundaries to 30 June 2023, and owing to the general elections in 2024, the census can now only take place in late 2024.
[12] This was confirmed in July 2023, when the Government of India extended the deadline to freeze the administrative boundaries to 1 January 2024, ruling out the census exercise before the 2024 Indian general election.
[13][14] On 20 September 2023, Union Home Minister Amit Shah informed during the discussion on Women's Reservation Bill that census and the delimitation exercise will take place after the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.
[15][16] On 30 December 2023, the deadline to freeze the administrative boundaries was further extended to 30 June 2024, thereby postponing the census to at least October 2024 due to it requiring three months to identify and train enumerators.
During the second phase of census taking, each person is enumerated and her/his individual particulars like age, marital status, religion, schedule caste/schedule tribe, mother tongue, education level, disability, economic activity, migration, fertility (for female) are collected.
For the 16th Indian census, the government was instead considering enumeration based on a list of educationally or socially disadvantaged castes (known as Other Backward Class) reported by each state.
[40] Minister of State Social Justice and Empowerment, Ramdas Athawale also demanded carrying of census counting every single caste in India.
[41] On 6 June 2022 the Bihar government issued a notification to conduct a caste survey, and began collecting data on 7 January following the dismissal of petitions against it in the supreme court.
[17] The official rationale for all the nine extensions has been the COVID-19 pandemic, however this has been criticized as during 2021–22, twelve countries in Asia were able to conduct their decennial census including neighbouring Bangladesh and Nepal.
Without data from the census, it is also difficult to validate the outcomes of government interventions using key metrics such as literacy, housing, fertility, urbanization, etc.